This article, delivered as one of two keynote lectures at the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) in Milan in September 2022, offers an example of an autosociobiographical approach to the history of education, in which the life story of the author is entangled with the collective movement of a generation of…

This article is focused on the theoretical basis of the study of the history of education in Serbia in the period from the foundation of the first Teacher College (1871) to the end of the socialist establishment in the country (1989). By theoretical bases, we mean theoretical and methodological assumptions, including ideological patterns, which…

It is commonly acknowledged that the roots of contemporary education in Turkey have been cultivated following the declaration of the republic in 1923 and previous accounts are rarely mentioned. This mindset is similar for several fields except for areas such as religious education and moral education. The research related to the history of…

The late Ottoman education policy implemented curriculum reforms adding science courses reduced to school children level. The modern science was popularised by supplementing public education with the new courses. Textbooks with illustrations efficiently introduced children to European material improvements and icons of progress. Between the years…

From the late sixteenth century, in response to the problem of how best to teach children to read, a variety of texts, such as primers, spellers and readers were produced in England for vernacular instruction. This paper describes how these materials were used by teachers to develop, first, a specific religious understanding according to the…

The New Social Studies movement was an effort by social scientists to reform US social studies/history curriculum at all levels during the 1960s and early 1970s. In the end, more than 50 different projects attempting to revitalise social studies were developed. Many of the projects focused on inquiry-based teaching practices and curriculum.…

There has been little study of political exile as a means for transferring pedagogic ideas and models, which has been important in Latin America, especially in the case of the Spaniards exiled in Mexico after the defeat of the Second Republic at the end of the 1930s. The Mexican government's sympathy with the Second Republic allowed many teachers…

For most educational historians, the Harold Rugg textbook controversy serves as an example of the mid-twentieth-century "assault" on progressive education. By restricting their analyses of the textbook controversy to the "rise and fall" of the progressivism paradigm, however, scholars have generally missed Americans' more measured approach to the…

Presentism is generally regarded as a necessary evil in historiography. This paper explores the upside of that inevitability. Using a philosophical approach to discourse analysis in the tradition of new cultural history, the paper distinguishes between a strategic use of presentism on the one hand, and a rationalistic approach to history on the…

With the introduction of arithmetic as a compulsory part of the elementary school curriculum in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany, textbooks and pedagogical methods were wanted. Relying on the traditions of the Rechenbucher and informed by the demand for method found in Wolffian style advanced textbooks, the first generation of…

Continuities and changes in stories, poems and historical texts over several generations of German textbooks, from the final decades of the Kaiserreich through the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich, show how schools encouraged children to imagine Germany's eastern borderlands and to incorporate them into their sense of national belonging. The…

In the USA, authority over teacher education and certification rests with the individual states rather than the federal government. Nonetheless, US mathematics teacher-education programs bear a strong resemblance in their fundamental structure to one another and to the earliest such programs established in the 1890s. This paper examines an…

The earliest legislation aimed to give comprehensive organization to the Italian education system was the Casati law, from the name of the then Minister for Education Gabrio Casati who drafted it. Promulgated by King Vittorio Emanuele II on 13 November 1859, the new law was designed to reorganize the school system in Piedmont and Lombardy, and was…